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Microwave Food Packaging

Chapter · January 2017

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CHAPTER FOUR

MICROWAVE FOOD PACKAGING

4.1 Introduction
Microwave packaging for food products has to fulfill several requirements for
functionality, e.g.

o Providing protection to the product in storage, transportation, and use

o Improving the heating performance in a microwave oven
o Not causing the oven use safety and food safety problems
o Aesthetics to attract the consumers to products.

Compared to most other types of food packaging, the uniqueness of microwave

packaging is the requirement for the package to be part of the microwave heating
cycle, like a wok in conventional cooking. Consumers actually can consume the foods
in the package after it is heated. It can serve as a part of heating configuration and a
dinning device as well.

Meeting above requirements, many materials can be used for microwave packaging,
such as

o Glass and ceramics.

o Paper, paper board, and structured film.
o Polymer trays
o Metalized paper
o Metal trays
o Edible materials

Different materials have different costs for the packaging, but they also provide
different kinds of functionalities. The high cost materials may provide better
functionality, the selection of appropriate packaging materials relies on many other
factors, such as type of food, product positioning as value or premium, in-home or
out-home, on-the-go or restaurant. For example, paper is low cost material but it may
be good enough for people on the go.

For ordinary microwave food consumers, the more important thing is the
understanding of mechanism of heating related function under microwave radiations.
We can term it as active packaging, which will be the focus of this chapter.

4.2 Metal in A Microwave Oven

4.3.1 The Use of Metal in the Microwave Oven

Hua Zhang© January 2017

In above section, we discussed the using of metallic materials in the microwave oven.
It may raise questions as people reading a microwave oven manual would find out the
directions of not putting metal parts in the oven. Often microwave oven was portrayed
as dangerous fire hazards in literature and movies. In fact, metals can be put into a
microwave oven, but there is a potential for causing fire due to sparks and arcs. In the
early days of microwave cooking, microwave manufacturers decided that the “do(s)
and don’t(s)” of metal were best left at “do not”. The oven manufacturers thought it
was in their best interest to avoid confusing the new oven owner in the intricacies of
using metals, especially the oven could be damaged because of improper uses of
metal for many early microwave ovens. In old days, the magnetrons were not
designed of capable total reflection of microwave power in an accident. The education
of regular oven owners on the appropriate uses of metal in oven is an impossible job
due to the complexity of the issue. Additionally, the manufacturers also concerned
with product liability and legal issues.

In a sense, microwave is generated by metal. Microwave and metal are integral parts
of a microwave system. Microwave cavity and waveguide are made of metals for
guiding and confining microwave. In a microwave oven cavity, a metallic piece
absorbs very small amount of microwave energy, but does interference with
microwave and change the distributions of heating pattern in the cavity. If metal
container with food is in the cavity, several things may occur:

o Microwave energy may be reflected back into the magnetron. This can be true
for most of time. As a small amount of food usually absorbs less amount of
power, e.g. more power is reflected, the metal container effectively make the
food smaller due to the area close the metal surface has less chance to
microwave. Sometimes, the reflected power may be reduced due to higher
power absorption with certain geometry and dielectric properties of the
product.
o The reflected power will not damage the magnetron as modern oven are
designed to dissipate the heat caused by reflected wave.
o The heating pattern may be changed due to the metal surfaces (discussed in
detail in following section).
o Food in touch or close to the metal surfaces may not get enough heating.
o Sparks and arcs if the container is too close to the oven walls (discussed in
following section).

4.3.2 Spark and Arc

The major safety concern for using microwave oven is spark and arc, which cause fire
in the oven. Both sparks and arcs are capable of igniting and burning or melting metal
surfaces. However, once the arcing is controlled properly, it poses no safety problem.
For examples, the fluoresce lights and plasma TV utilize the plasma that is created by
arcing as light sources.

There is no clear-cut distinction between a spark and an arc. Generally speaking

however, a spark designates a transient condition in which the voltage drop across the
conducting channel is decreasing with time while an arc designates a steady-state
condition in which the voltage across the channel has reached a constant and fairly
low value. Under very high voltage between two points with a small distance, e.g.
Hua Zhang© January 2017

high electric field strength, the electric forces pull the electrons in the molecules away
and the air or other gas becomes conductive due to the ionic state of the gas. The
plasma generated by arcing can be very hot up to hundred million degrees of
centigrade if purposely controlled.

In microwave heating cavity, extremely high electric field strength can happen to be
within two points and break down the air in between, causing spark. Spark is the
cause of arc. If the points are of metal parts, the arcing is seen as yellow light, if the
two points are of food materials the arcing is seen as blue. The arcing between metal
parts is more common than that of two non-metal parts and noisier. For most time the
arcing is not self-sustainable, will stop itself after a short time of blazing. Sometimes,
the arcing occurs at a specific place in a microwave cavity when the arcing points turn
to that place on the turntable. However, when flammable materials, such as paper or
dried food product, are in the arcing point it could have harmful results.

The Breakdown Voltage

The electric field strength that can breakdown air and create spark is different
depending on the geometry of the metal parts. In a standard test with sphere to plane,
the breakdown electric field strength is about 31 kV/cm. In the testing of an electrode
of a sphere to an electrode of plane the electric field is homogeneous, which gives the
highest breakdown voltage. The relation between field strength and voltage is as
follows:

E = Voltage/Distance (V/cm).

Electric field strength is the voltage in between divides by the gap distance. In
microwave heating in a cavity, the maximum electric strength is somewhere from 200
to 2000 V/cm depending on whether a large load (100 gram) is in or not. The
distribution of the electric fields is non-uniform in the cavity. Even though the
maximum field strength in the cavity is much less than the breakdown strength, 31
kV/cm, locally this can change due to the geometry of the metal parts. On the sharp
edge and corner of metal part, the electric charges tend to concentrate at one point
therefore create extremely high field strength locally. Especially, when two or more
pieces of metal with sharp edges and corners are very close, the spark and arc are
unavoidable.

Breakdown voltage also depends on other factors, such as air density, the lower the
density the less the breakdown. High humidity in the microwave cavity allows the
lower breakdown electric strength. However, when the gap is not consisting of air but
some other material, such as plastics or paper, the breakdown voltage is the dielectric
strength of the material. Table 1 shows the dielectric strength of different materials.
Hua Zhang© January 2017

Table 1. The Dielectric Strength of Ceramic and Plastic Materials

Material Dielectric strength

(kV/cm)
Ceramics 82 Al2O3
Ceramics 9.1 MgO-SiO2
Plastics 214 Nylon MD
Plastics 150 PET-P
Plastics 148 Acetal
Plastics 336 Lexan

It is obvious that spark is much more difficult in ceramics, plastics and other solid
materials than that in air. Moreover, the more energy is needed for breaking solid
material than air.

4.3.3 Runaway Heating for Electric Conductive Materials

Of cause, not all the fire in microwave oven is caused by spark and arc. Thermal
runaway can also create extremely high temperature in the oven. Very thin metal film,
such as aluminum foil with less than 3 microns’ thickness can absorb very a large
amount energy. Let’s consider a thin filmstrip of copper coated on a dielectric
substrate, paper or ceramics, the power absorbed by the metal strip can be calculated
as:

E02
P (4.1)
4

Where  is the electric conductivity of the metal; E0 is the amplitude of the

electric field in microwave oven; and:


 is the attenuation constant.
2

The temperature of the metal strip can be calculated based on information on size and
thickness, frequency, electric conductivity and E0, etc. For a thin metal strip with
natural convection on its surfaces, the maximum temperature it can reach at different
thickness of the metal (bronze copper) is shown in Figure 4.1. The temperature can
reach more than 1000 oC in a fraction of second for a moderate 40 V/m of electric
field on the surface. It will sure result in melting the metal material, then, the sparking
will follow because of the evaporation of the metal material.
Hua Zhang© January 2017

Maximum Temperature for A Metal Strip (Bronze

Copper) in Microwave Oven

2500

2000

Temperature ( o C)
E0=50 V/m
1500
E0=40 V/m
1000
E0=30 V/m
500

0
0.001 0.01 0.1 1 10
Thickness of The Metal Strip (mm)

Figure 4.1. Maximum temperature for different thickness of the metal (bronze copper)
in a microwave oven

4.3.4 Safety Guidelines for metal in the microwave oven

Usually metal can be placed inside the oven, but a couple of guidelines should be
followed:

o Never place a metal piece too close to the oven walls, 1 cm distance is
recommended. Note that the gap must be observed when the piece is rotating
along with the turntable.
o Avoid putting two or more metal pieces in close proximity, 1 cm distance
should be maintained.
o When adding aluminum foil to a package, make sure the foil pieces are contact
completely without gaps in between.
o Avoid placing a single piece of metal that has pinpoints like an antenna in the
oven.

Usually a single piece of metal, well defined, with certain thickness and away from
the oven cavity walls, does not cause sparking. For examples, many kinds of metal
pieces, such as a metal spoon, metal tray, etc., will not arc in the oven cavity.

4.3 Microwave Active Packaging

If we define active packaging for foods so as that the packaging takes part in the
cooking processing during microwave heating, then any packaging is considered as
active packaging in microwave heating. The rational is that the heating is not only
related to the power source but also to the food itself, including properties and
geometry, which are factors of how much microwave energy is transferred to foods. A
round tray may need different heating time compared to that of rectangular tray with
Hua Zhang© January 2017

same amount of same food product. Container itself adds to the functionality in
microwave heating process.

In order to avoid confusion on the active packaging concept, we try to differentiate

the regular packaging and the ones that assist the heating either by providing heated
surfaces (susceptors) or by modifying the fields through metal shielding (Field
Modifier) from the packaging that only define a geometry of the food product.
Therefore, we have three different types of active packaging as follows:

o Metalized paper (susceptor) or other materials that can create heated surfaces
in the heating
o Metallic materials that define the electromagnetic boundary conditions in the
oven
o Dielectric materials that can affect the heating patterns in the product.
o Regular containers that only define the geometry of the food product.

4.2.1 Shielding by metallic material

For packaging with metallic materials, usually aluminum foil, the boundary condition
at the metal surface for tangential electric field is forced to be zero (Eq. 4.2). The
electric fields on the surface have direction of perpendicular to the surface itself.

Et  0 ------(4.2)

Noted that the wave propagation direction may not be perpendicular to the metal
surface. This forced boundary condition allows the re-arrangement of the heating
potentials inside the food materials. This re-arrangement of heating potentials may not
generate desired effect on uniform heating. If the metal stripe is large in size (>50
cm^2), the food material close to metal surface may not get enough energy. Some
time it may be needed for control the heat in certain areas.

There are three technologies considered as field modifiers. The first modifier was
developed to shield microwave energy from places where the higher heating rate
occur, such as at edges and corners. The second technology is to use conductive loops
of electric lengths that equal to integral multiples of the energy wavelength. In another
word, these loops help the local spot to obtain more energy than it would not get
otherwise. The ‘rabbit ear’ antenna is another field modifier structure that was
developed to transfer energy from areas of high impingement to areas of limited
energy impingement.

Applying metallic material in packaging can be an effective technology in general for

appropriately directing microwave energy to uniformly heat the foods if an
appropriate structure is found. This, however, only addresses half the problem
because the heating pattern inside foods also depends on the food itself. Therefore, for
successful applications of the packaging with metallic materials food factor must be
considered in conjunction with the active packaging.
Hua Zhang© January 2017

4.2.2 Shielding by Dielectric Materials

When a dielectric material, such as a ceramic container, is used in the heating, the
heating pattern can also be changed. For example, ceramic material typically has
dielectric properties of 4 to 8 for constant and 0.01 to 0.5 for loss factors. The
dielectric properties like these will affect the distribution of the heating pattern.
Consumers usually use ceramic plates, dishes, and mugs to heat food materials in
microwave oven and do not realized that these containers actually play a role in the
heating.

Packaging with dielectric material is not commercially available yet, because of the
lack of understanding and the complexity of the interaction between microwave and
the dielectric material.

4.4 The Heating Modes for Cylindrical Shaped Products

As discussed in above sections, metals can be part of the food packaging or cooking
aids for microwave heating. As long as guidelines are followed, the safety of metals in
the oven is not a problem. Now the question is how the metal pieces can improve the
quality of the food products? Metals interference with microwave because electric
fields are forced to zero (Equation 4.1) inside the metal. This interference can go both
ways in term of heating patterns. Creating favorable heating patterns is what we want.

From patent literature, many structures of metal foil have been proposed based on
trials and errors. Generally speaking, these metallic structured packaging give some
improvement for product quality under certain conditions, such as particular type of
ovens and food products. There are hardly any engineering fundamentals developed in
this area. In order to understand why sometime metal piece has good impacts on the
quality and sometimes has bad impacts, a close look on the basic theory of microwave
engineering is necessary.

To simplify the analysis, only cylindrical shaped products are discussed. For other
geometry, the analysis may not make exact sense but can be good reference. In fact,
foods are such products that are not possible to be exact cylindrical or spherical.
Nevertheless, the analysis given in this section can shed insights how the patterns are
created in microwave heating.

A frozen meal in cylindrical or elliptical geometry can be considered as dielectric

resonator. The actual heating pattern for the meal consists of all the resonating modes
of the resonator. The resonating modes inside the meal can be estimated based on the
size and the dielectric properties. The analysis includes two scenarios, e.g. with and
without metallic layer on the sidewalls.

4.4.1 Resonating mode with metallic sidewall

Hua Zhang© January 2017

The metallic wall and the cavity of the microwave oven make the meal in round
container a circular waveguide cavity because standing waves occur inside the foods.
The modes inside the food can be estimated based on the theoretical analysis. As the
size of the object increases, more modes can exist in the object. A linear addition of
the modes makes up the hating pattern of the object.

For examples, the solutions of the electromagnetic fields of TE111, TE211 modes can
be listed as follows according to [link]:

'
p11r
Hz  J1 ( ) cos( Ae j11z  Ae j11z )
a
 ja ' p11 '
r
Hr  '
J 1 ( ) cos( Ae j11z  Ae j11z )
p11 a
ja2 '
p11r
H  ' 2 J1 ( ) sin( Ae j11z  Ae j11z )
( p11) r a ----------------------(4.3)
jkZ0a2 '
p11r
Er  ' 2
J1 ( ) sin( Ae j11z  Ae j11z )
( p11) r a
'
jkZ0a ' p11 r
E  '
J1 ( ) cos( Ae j11z  Ae j11z )
( p11)r a
Ez  0

For TE211 mode, the fields are:

'
p21r
Hz  J2 ( ) cos(Ae j21z  Ae j21z )
a
 ja ' p21 '
r
Hr  ' J2 ( ) cos(Ae j21z  Ae j21z )
p21 a
2 ja2 '
p21 r
H  ' 2
J 2 ( )sin(Ae j21z  Ae j21z )
( p21) r a -----------(4.4)
2 jkZ0a2 p21'
r
Er  ' 2
J2 ( )sin(Ae j21z  Ae j21z )
( p21) r a
'
jkZ0a ' p21 r
E  ' J2 ( ) cos(Ae j21z  Ae j21z )
( p21)r a
Ez  0

The mathematic forms of the modes are not very useful if the values of the constants,
A+ and A-, are not known. However, the plots for distribution of the electromagnetic
field can be made, as shown in Figure 4.2, to understand the overall patterns of the
heating.

For a given size of cylindrical object, the possible modes can be determined by
Equation 4.5. To satisfy the boundary condition, the following equation must be held:
Hua Zhang© January 2017

------------ (4.5)

Where a is the radius of the container; d is the height of the container; n, m, l, are
natural numbers; c is the speed of light; fnml is the frequency of microwaves; xnm is
p’nm for TE modes and pnm for TM modes; p’nm and pnm are zeros for first kind Bessel
functions.

Equation (4.5) can be graphed as following figure for various modes [Collin, 1999].

Figure 4.2. Resonant mode Chart for a cylindrical cavity

For frozen meals, the dielectric constants are ranging from 3 to 5, therefore the
resonating modes inside can be calculated based Figure 2.2, as shown in the following
table for fnml = 2450 MHz and height d = 3.5 cm.

Table 2.1 Modes supported in the cylindrical object with metallic sidewalls
Hua Zhang© January 2017

Radius (cm) (2afnml)2 r 2a/d Modes Supported

4 15.4x108 2.3 TE111, TM010, TM110
5 24x108 2.8 TE111, TM010, TM110
6 34.5 x108 3.4 TE111, TM010, TM110, TE211, TM011

According to the solutions of these modes, TE modes usually carry more power than
TM modes for small , therefore the focus is on the TE modes. Electromagnetic fields
at cross sections are plotted in Figure 4.3. When radius is small, the only TE mode it
supports is TE111. It is clear that TE111 mode give a fairly concentrated heating in the
center area. When the radius increases to 6 cm a new TE mode starts to become
dominate, e.g. TE211. As shown in Figure 4.3, the TE211 mode has a center cold spot.

Figure 4.3. The electromagnetic field distributions for TE11 (left) and TE21 (right)
modes

4.4.2 Resonating mode without metallic sidewall

When the meal in a container heated in a microwave oven without any modification
on package, the meal can be seen as a dielectric resonator. The main heating pattern
can be estimated using mode analysis according to [Collin, 1999]. At frequency of
2450 MHz (frequency for most of microwave ovens), the resonating modes can be
found through the following equations:

d 
tan 
2  (4.6)

Where
Hua Zhang© January 2017

2
 p ' nm 
     k 02
 a 
2
 p ' nm 
   r k  
2
0

 a 
2 f
k0 
c

If we assume the diameter is 10 cm and r is 4, the resonating mode is TE31. Therefore

we can assume that the major factor for the heating pattern is similar to the plot as
shown in Figure 4.4, which again shows a cold center.

Figure 4.4. The heating pattern for TE31 mode

4.4.3 Experimental Verification

Experiments using frozen lasagna in containers with different radii were heated in a
microwave oven (Welbilt 850 W). The thermal images were taken after the heating.
For container with metallic shielding on the sidewalls, the one with smaller radius (10
cm in diameter), as shown Figure 4.5 (right), has concentrated heating in the center
area while the one with larger radius (14 cm in diameter), as shown the Figure 4.3
(left), has a cold center. This can be explained by the theoretic results listed in Table
2.1. For large radius container (7 cm in radius) it has TE211 as dominated mode, which
presents a cold spot in the center, as shown in Figure 4.3 (right). For radius of 5 cm,
TE111 is the dominating mode, which is quite uniform in heating potential as shown
in Figure 4.3 (left).
Hua Zhang© January 2017

Figure 4.5. The thermal images for lasagna heated in a microwave oven (Welbilt
850W) in a larger container (left) and a smaller container (right), both have aluminum
shielding on the sidewall.

Figure 4.6 Thermal image for lasagna heated in a microwave oven (Welbilt 850W) a
smaller container with radius of 5.2 cm.

If a frozen lasagna in a round tray without metallic material on the packaging, the
thermal image, as shown in Figure 4.6, indicates the dominating heating mode is TE31
(as seen in Figure 2.3), which has a slightly bigger cold spot in the center area
compared with TE21 (as seen in Figure 4.4). In summary, the metallic shielding on the
sidewall of a round tray may or may not generate favorable heating pattern depending
upon the diameters.

4.5 Steam Bags/Vessels

The heating of microwave foods can get help from secondary heating effect, such as
the steam generated by microwave energy heating of water or high water content
foods. If there is some containment of steam inside a package or bag, the steam will
Hua Zhang© January 2017

enhance the microwave heating. Since steam is very effective in heat transfer, it can
make the microwave cooking more desirable in food quality. Such method could be
used in microwaveable food products and in-home use of microwave heating. One
can add water in a container of multiple compartments or have more water in foods.
Since water or salty water has high dielectric loss factor, it typically absorbs more
microwave energy and create steam first.

4.6 Microwave Crispiness

Microwave heating is known to be saggy and soft texture due to the water driven to
the surfaces by internal volumetric heating. This is not desirable for foods such as
pizza and other baked dough products. The susceptor sometime is not sufficient to
provide the high enough temperature or long enough time to withstand the amount of
moisture from inside the food due to the fact that once the coated metal film broken
susceptor is no longer absorb any microwave energy.

Some ceramic material is good to absorb the microwave energy, but it is not absorb
more microwave energy than the food material in touch with it. The dielectric
property of ceramic material is not comparable with water rich or salt rich food
materials. So it fall short of serving as a device for providing crispiness in microwave
heating. However, this can be changed if the ceramic material has built-in metallic
material in certain configurations.

How to make microwave pizza crispy?

One way to make food, such as pizza, crispy after microwave heating is to use a
device that can generate extremely high surface temperature, much higher than
traditional radiation or convection heating ovens. Such high temperature is needed
because pizza also receive energy from volumetric heating of microwaves, which
requires to have higher surface heating. In such a way, the moisture will have less
possibility to be transported into surface area and make it soggy. Such device can be
constructed by laminating metal mesh into a ceramic plate. The mesh is capable of
localization of the electromagnetic fields and heating the ceramic material into
extremely high temperature. This device may be safe in normal households, but can
be handled by professionals in food service venues.

4.7 Microwave heating special plates

In households, people can cook their meals with desirable quality by doing some
tricks to the containers of the foods. In sections 4.3, 4.4, we have talked about using
metals for assisting microwave heating. Here I want to introduce another way of the
that concept to enhance the microwave heating experience. Figure 4.7 shows a plate
with glued aluminum tape in special pattern. These metallic on the bottom of the plate
change the microwave heating pattern for good.
Hua Zhang© January 2017

Figure 4.7 Aluminum tape glued on the bottom of the plate to modify microwave
heating patterns.

Some lab tests were conducted with this method and the results are very good, as
shown in Figures 4.8/9.

Figure 3.8, Cooking chicken meal with shielding in a microwave oven

 Hua Zhang© January 2017

Figure 4.9, Batter tests of heating pattern with/out shielding

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